Month: April 2016

Garfum.com's new invention. (credit: USPTO)

A New Jersey man named Michael Garofalo had a patent he claimed covered online contests, and used it to demand money from other small businesses. But when the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to the defense of a photographer targeted by Garofalo last year, Garofalo quickly dropped his case. Last month, he and his lawyers were ordered to pay $29,000 in legal fees.

Now Garofalo, who owns the website Garfum.com, is asking for the fee smackdown to be reconsidered. His reasoning: since the US Patent and Trademark Office recently agreed to grant him another patent, nearly identical to the first, his case couldn't possibly be considered "exceptional."

"This new evidence shows that this case does not lack substantive strength," writes Garfum.com's lawyers, from the Texas-based Austin Hansley law firm. "Simply put, how could Plaintiff’s position lack substantive strength when the USPTO performed the same § 101 analysis as this Court and found nearly identical claims to recite patentable subject matter?"

Walt Disney Pictures

Mowgli and his wolf-mother bid each other farewell in a touching moment.

6 more images in gallery

Does the film universe need two live-action, CGI-boosted versions of The Jungle Book? Apparently so, as both Disney and Warner Bros. want to dig their computer-animated claws into Rudyard Kipling's famed colonial-India screed.

WB's version, which will count as motion-capture expert Andy Serkis' directorial debut, won't see the light of day until October 2018, which leaves Disney's stab at the story as the only live-action option for some time. Lucky for us, this Disney-fied version doesn't just win by default.

Give equal credit to Jon Favreau as director and Moving Picture Company as visual effects overseers. They had to contend with some serious baggage—namely, Disney's own hokey, Kipling-crippling cartoon version from 1967—and still came away with a warm, touching, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous film that has somehow split the difference between family-friendliness and the book's original vision.

Amazon won a Golden Globe this year for its original series Transparent. (credit: Amazon)

In 2015, a study was published that claimed that reducing prejudice against homosexual people was relatively easy. All it took was a brief conversation with a stranger who was going door to door talking about prejudice against homosexuals. Supposedly, participants’ attitudes remained changed up to three months after said conversation.

The study received widespread media coverage and was considered groundbreaking because we knew so little about how to reduce prejudice. Unfortunately, it turned out to be built largely on fraudulent data, and the study was retracted.

Ironically, the researcher who uncovered the fraudulent data in this first canvassing study, David Broockman, has now published his own study on the same issue. It demonstrates that canvassing actually does change participants’ attitudes toward transgender individuals and that this change in attitudes persists for at least three months.

(credit: Spies Like Us)

Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against the US government over the number of secrecy orders it has received to allow g-men and cops access to customers' e-mails and other records.

The software giant's chief legal officer Brad Smith said that gagging orders had been applied to 2,576 such demands over the course of an 18-month period. Microsoft's top counsel added that 1,752 (68 percent) of those secrecy orders had no end date—"This means we effectively are prohibited forever [Smith's emphasis] from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data," he said.

Smith added in a blog post:

The human whipworm, a type of helminth that infects the large intestine and ranges from 30 to 50 mm long. (credit: Delorieux for Johann Gottfried Bremser)

One day, curing complex intestinal diseases could be as simple as opening a can of worms.

Researchers have long had hints that parasites called helminths, or intestinal worms, may in some cases help ward off inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease—intestinal inflammation that leads to cramps, severe diarrhea, fatigue, and weight loss. However, the worms’ disease-fighting skills had previously wiggled through scientists' grasp.

Now, in a study published Thursday in Science, researchers report that the gut-dwelling worms help avert IBD by bolstering good bacteria in the gut and chucking out inflammation-sparking germs. For mice genetically engineered to have Crohn’s disease, gulping down worm eggs significantly reduced inflammation and signs of disease.